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10x Engineer

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Re: 10x Engineer

#41

Post by JimboOmega »

craigyk wrote: post #27
philbo wrote: post #25

Even if the 10x engineer were to exist, assuming a normal distribution, they would be extremely rare and highly sought after. To optimise your business around hiring such a precious unicorn would seem like a very foolhardy strategy. For one, simple probability suggests that you probably won't find one. And if you were to find one, could you be certain that it were a real unicorn rather than a horse with a plastic con…

YES. What the 10X myth hurt most is probably hiring practices.

The thing that always got me is that even if they do exist, the candidate selection methods are, at best, a very unreliable way to identify them.

Still, it really fed into the "only hire the absolute best" mythos that has spread in countless other harmful ways. Consider the aphorism "A players hire A players, B players hire C players".

The general message of all of it has always been: "You must hire the very best, even one merely good employee will poison the well and ruin everything".

Yet hiring practices are, as I said already, imprecise... which creates all sorts of bizarre behavior in the attempt to snag the "very best".

Re: 10x Engineer

#42

Post by bjourne »

10x might not be a good description. It is not specified at all what is multiplied by ten. But I'm sure there are engineers that are capable of performing at levels far, far beyond the average.

No one would bat an eye if you point out the huge skill differential between a professional musician or a professional footballer and an amateur. If it could be quantified, Yngwie would be at least 500x better electric guitar player than me and Messi 9.37e8 better at football. I don't think software development skill is all that different. In fact, it would be surprising if the difference between average and elite was only 10x when it is so much larger in other disciplines.

Re: 10x Engineer

#43

Post by duncanwilcox »

Do you believe chess Grand Masters exist? They're blind to invalid moves, they don't even see strategically penalizing moves.

"10x engineer" sounds like a requirement a recruiter would put in a boring corporate job summary. Meh.

Re: 10x Engineer

#44

Post by msandford »

ltcoleman wrote: post #39
jandrewrogers wrote: post #24

While the article correctly highlights the lack of rigorous scientific studies on 10x engineers, it also generalizes a bit too much from anecdote to make the argument that they are mythical creatures. A more reasonable argument is that the hypothetical existence of 10x engineers explains little about the productivity of most organizations. Personally, in the couple decades I have been in this business working in coun…

Your words are extremely accurate to me. There ARE 10x engineers but it takes a lot of experience to even have a chance at becoming one. A new grad ( even out of somewhere lik e Stanford ) has no chance to be a 10x engineer especially in a startup landscape (assuming a small startup with few extremely experienced engineers) without proper mentorship. The only people that i would say are 10x have worked at larger comp…

Yeah, I would agree. Also Spolsky has some pretty interesting data regarding the 10x programmer. It's students, not professionals but it does indicate that (surprise, surprise) things are distributed and it's smeared out quite a bit.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html

Re: 10x Engineer

#45

Post by DannoHung »

jrs99 wrote: post #21

John Carmack was 10x.

If John Carmack is a 10x programmer, then trying to find 10x people for your organization is an absolute lost cause unless you're willing to shift your entire organization to be what he wants to do. Because there's only one Carmack and he does whatever the fuck he feels like.

Re: 10x Engineer

#46

Post by gnaritas »

craigyk wrote: post #16
gnaritas wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible they can do things you can't do at all or can't do in a reasonable amount of time so 10x is certainly possible simply because they could have far superior knowledge.

I think the danger of the myth arrives from the idea that one can label some engineers as consistently 10X better than their peers, regardless of the actual tasks, personal lives, health, etc.

True, but honestly the 10x thing is only true because so many in the field are so bad that's it's not hard to do 10x more than they do. There are many copy/paste example and modify type programmers that can bang out work consistently yet do so very slowly and build very hard to maintain systems. Programmers who use virtually no abstraction and think it's fine to open a connection to the database and run some sql to get a result set and slap it on the screen and never once realize every method shouldn't duplicate the code to connect to the database and run some sql.

Re: 10x Engineer

#47

Post by finnh »

rumcajz wrote: post #37

I always thought of 10x engineer not as one that writes 1000 LoC while others write 100 LoC. Rather, as one that says, at an early stage of development "let's do it this way" and the total amount of manyears spent on the project (including maintenance etc.) happens to be 100 rather than 1000, which would be the case if second best approach is pursued.

exactly. good engineers do less, not more.

Re: 10x Engineer

#48

Post by eitland »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #35

There are probably a few real "10x developers" out there but the reality is that there are so many lazy and under qualified developers out there that it's not hard for anyone who has put concentrated effort into learning to program to look like one.

Yep. I'm hardly a 10x engineer but time and time again people tell me I'm the only one to solve basic questions.

As one person who hired me said: there are an awful lot of people who want to have a fat programmer salary but very few who can tell me what design patterns are good for.

Basically once you get past the recruiters there's very little competent competition.

Re: 10x Engineer

#49

Post by tdees40 »

I think the free market mostly answers this question. According to indeed.com, the average software engineer salary is $91K. So obviously a company (assuming they could properly identify them) would pay $910K/year to a 10x programmer. Are there people out there making that for pure coding (i.e. not management)? Maybe, but it seems doubtful. I would think that generally 99.9999% of programmers make less than $400K if they're just doing programming (I'm excluding things like options or equity in comp, which is mostly just a lotto ticket anyway). So the market seems to think that even the absolute best are 3x-4x programmers.

Re: 10x Engineer

#50

Post by dragonwriter »

fatman wrote: post #3

If I'm being generous, I'm a slightly above average engineer. Spot me 10X and I'll outperform any engineer on the planet. Do I believe in the 2X engineer? Definitely. 3X? Sure. 5X? Possibly, if their name is Ritchie or Torvalds or the like. But 10X? What I do in a week, they'd only get 4 hours. What I do in a year, they'd get 5 weeks. Doesn't exist.

I don't think the idea is that a 10x engineer doesn't do the same thing a 1x engineer does at 10 times the speed, I think the idea is that a 10x engineer delivers 10 times the value that a 1x engineer does (or the same value at 1/10 the cost.)

(IIRC seeing a study several years back which suggested a 10x increase in cost to address an issue for each step later in the "requirements -> development -> acceptance test -> production" sequence it was identified; even if that's not true in exact numbers, the basic trend of escalating costs is and a developer that, on a team, leads to the team doing substantially better at identifying problems up front might get the code they directly write through the process from requirements complete to ready to test at the same speed as other developers and still be a 10x developer.)

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